"The Tartars followed these fugitive Italian merchants, and, surrounding the city of Caffa, besieged it likewise.[12] Completely encircled by this vast army of enemies, the inhabitants were hardly able to obtain the necessaries of life, and their only hope lay in the fleet which brought them provisions. Suddenly 'the death,' as it was called, broke out in the Tartar host, and thousands were daily carried off by the disease, as if "arrows from heaven were striking at them and beating down their pride."
"At first the Tartars were paralysed with fear at the ravages of the disease, and at the prospect that sooner or later all must fall victims to it. Then they turned their vengeance on the besieged, and in the hope of communicating the infection to their Christian enemies, by the aid of the engines of war, they projected the bodies of the [p006] dead over the walls into the city. The Christian defenders, however, held their ground, and committed as many of these plague-infected bodies as possible to the waters of the sea.
"Soon, as might be supposed, the air became tainted and the wells of water poisoned, and in this way the disease spread so rapidly in the city that few of the inhabitants had strength sufficient to fly from it."[13]
The further account of Gabriele de' Mussi describing how a ship from Caffa conveyed the infection to Genoa, from which it spread to other districts and cities of Italy, must be deferred to the next chapter. Here a short space may be usefully devoted to a consideration of the disease itself, which proved so destructive to human life in every European country in the years 1348–1350. And, in the first place, it may be well to state that the name Black Death, by which the great pestilence is now generally known, not only in England, but elsewhere, is of comparatively modern origin.[14] In no contemporary account of the epidemic is it called by that ominous title; at the time people spoke of it as "the pestilence," "the great mortality," "the death," "the plague of Florence," etc., and, apparently, not until some centuries later was it given the name of "the Black Death." This it seems to have first received in Denmark or Sweden, although it is doubtful whether the atra mors of Pontanus is equivalent to the English Black Death.[15] It is hard to resist the impression that in England, at least, it was used as the recognised name for the epidemic of 1349 only after the pestilence of the 17th century had assumed to itself the title of the Great Plague. Whether the name Black Death was first adopted to express the universal state of mourning to which the disease reduced the people of all [p007] countries, or to mark the special characteristic symptoms of this epidemic, is, under the circumstances of its late origin, unimportant to determine.
The epidemic would appear to have been some form of the ordinary Eastern or bubonic plague. Together, however, with the usual characteristic marks of the common plague, there were certain peculiar and very marked symptoms, which, although not universal, are recorded very generally in European countries.
In its common form the disease showed itself in swellings and carbuncles under the arm and in the groin. These were either few and large—being at times as large as a hen's egg—or smaller and distributed over the body of the sufferer. In this the disease does not appear to have been different from the ordinary bubonic plague, which ravaged Europe during many centuries, and which is perhaps best known in England as so destructive to human life in the great plague of London in 1665. In this ordinary form it still exists in Eastern countries, and its origin is commonly traced to the method of burying the dead in vogue there.
The special symptoms characteristic of the plague of 1348–9 were four in number:—
(1) Gangrenous inflammation of the throat and lungs;
(2) Violent pains in the region of the chest;
(3) The vomiting and spitting of blood; and